I was looking for a simple and cheap Wifi camera that would work with Home Assistant and doesn’t rely solely on cloud recording since that can get expensive very quickly. In my search, I came across the Xiaomi Xiaofang camera. Although this camera is ‘cloud only’ by default, @samtap on GitHub has created FangHacks, which is a set of scripts that can be installed on the Xiaofang to enable RTSP, along with a bunch of other features. It will also show you how to add this into Home Assistant. This post will go through the steps involved in installing these modifications.Read more...

The most recent project I decided to work on was a line following robot. However, as I was testing it to make sure the direction code was working, I decided to develop something that I can control from my smartphone. It turned out much better than I was expecting, so I figured I should make a blog post about it.

This is an update to my post about the Garage Door Notification which was based on my Wifi Garage Door Controller .About a week after my post about sending a repeating notification through Home Assistant, the developers created a new 'Alert' component that basically made my post obsolete. So I decided to switch over to the Alert component and add some extra features.

I've seen these games around, and I wanted to make my own. The object is simple. The metal wand has a loop with a long windy wire going through it, and the object is to get from one end of the wire to the other, without touching the wand to the wire. It automatically detects when the game is starting and when it ends, and records the last time and record time. It also displays this information on the OLED display and it buzzes when the wire is touched.

I saw that AliExpress had tiny OLED displays for just a few bucks, so I decided to order a few and figured that I would find a use for them. I haven’t found a use for them yet, but I figured I should go ahead and document what I did.

I have a sump pump in my basement that doesn’t run very often. I wanted to be able to get a notification when it did run and a notification in the event of a water leak, which might indicate that the pump isn’t functioning properly. Detecting water was relatively simple, but trying to figure out when the pump runs was a little more challenging. I looked into a vibration sensor since the pipes would vibrate very lightly when it came one, but the sensor just wasn’t sensitive enough. I also considered measuring the amount of sound, but I thought that might cause some false positives when the kids were in the basement playing.

I discovered this Arduino library a few weeks ago, and was surprised to see that there aren’t more projects that make use of it. I feel that anyone that is using OTA would have a use for this library. So I decided to make a post because I’m thinking that there are many people that don’t know about it. This library was written by JoaoLopesF.

This blog post builds on my last post about the Wemos D1 Mini Garage Door Controller.

Sending a notification via Home Assistant is a simple process, and it is mostly well documented. However, I had trouble finding a solution that repeatedly sends a notification about a device state until that state changes. In this case, I wanted something to notify me when my garage door is open for a while, and then continue sending me notifications every 30 minutes until it’s closed.